The effect of cryptocurrency mining on LTE spectrum - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iminehard/gpunoise/wiki <comment><USER3> If you just ground the device ground to a solid earth ground, RF emissions will usually go way down. The mounting stake and screw of a PC-slot card is its grounding point. He's bolting those things to painted metal that's bolted to other painted metal. Just sand the painted metal down a bit at the screw points before you attach, tie the frame pieces together electrically, and connect to a power plug ground. Check for ground continuity with an ohmmeter.

<comment><USER4> It would take some serious "skill" to plug in a PCI device and not have it grounded. There are at least a half dozen ground pins in the interface itself. I don't see what tying the GPU to ground again is meant to accomplish - it's not adding any shielding to the system as a whole.

DC continuity is not a good measure of impedance as you move into higher frequency RF signals. Wires that look like low-impedance connections can easily become accidental antennas.

<comment><USER5> It's not since for PC there is ground to earth through the case since the (power) ground through the power supply is often interrupted and does not lead to true earth.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Why? The power supply is a metal box in contact with the metal case; it is really not connected internally?

<comment><USER6> As parent said "painted metal". In this video showing how pc cases is made[0].

They mention they automate the powder coating of paint. So the external case should be well insulated.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2i-QhPCD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2i-QhPCD0)

<comment><USER3> _As parent said "painted metal"._

Look at the pictures in the original article. He built his open racks from multiple painted metal parts. The metal parts probably don't provide a solid path to ground. Connecting the ground stake to a big piece of metal that's not grounded adds an antenna to the thing and makes emissions worse.

Easy to fix. Use a Dremel tool and grind off the paint where the stake is screwed into the metal rail. Use jumper wires (properly, green ones) and crimped screw lugs to connect the rails together. Connect those to something that has a grounded case. Check with an ohmmeter to see that there's continuity between the metal cooling plate on the GPU and the ground pin of what plugs into the wall. Should be less than 1 ohm. Use an outlet tester to make sure your wall outlet has a valid ground pin. Now most of your RF hash gets clamped by the tie to ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My interests in cryptocurrency and my interests in radio astronomy started at about the same time, ~2010. I've definitely been able to notice that broadband low VHF noise when mining at home. By now I have literal years of recordings of it. For me it's worst around 144 MHz with my series of AMD GPU (5770, 7870, 7950) using DVI.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder: isn't this just the kind of things electronics get FCC tested for? How did nvidia get accredited by an FCC certified lab given the strong emissions in those bands?

<comment><USER9> Graphics cards only have to comply to EMI standards while mounted inside a computer chassis.

Ultimately the person/company putting a computer together (or importing it) is responsible for the whole computer adhering to EMI standards.

<comment><USER10> Heh, I just pictured a GPU inside an empty PC case, and then immediately realized of course that wouldn't work, and am now wondering, how do you generate the necessary load to correctly EMI-test a GPU?

Do GPUs include a secret "crank everything to 11" test mode feature that exercises all the cores and RAM and everything, so you can just bolt it into a case, maybe connect it to a fake motherboard that supplies 3.3V or whatever so the card initializes properly... or do vendors test with a massive pile of motherboards, measuring and offsetting for the EMI generated by each motherboard?

<comment><USER11> If the GPU + Motherboard passes EMI compliance, then the GPU - <USER2> must also pass, since the motherboard doesn't provide shielding but only adds noise. So I don't think the particular motherboard should matter. The measured interference will always be >= to the real interference produced by the GPU under test.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, good point, didn't quite look at it that way.

But now I'm wondering if there are motherboards out there that radiate a little bit more than they should, and force peripheral vendors to do extra work clipping EMI in their own products.

This is probably not true, since all PCI card vendors would have to test their products with tons of different boards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like the sort of tool you could use to find large mining rigs that have been set up in suburbs.

<comment><USER5> Thermal imaging is likely going to be better worse case you find a growhouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sort of RF signature could allow an "ecowarrior" to go around finding and sabotaging mining outfits. (Or, y'know, for a boring old burglar to go around stealing GPUs.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not enclose your "open" racks with some cheap aluminum screening from the hardware store?

Attach with Velcro. Also keeps out debris and literal bugs as a side benefit.

</comment><comment><USER15> It probably does not help that the use of the lower ranges for LTE is relatively new.

<comment><USER16> Which also penetrates through concrete and drywall better...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Eventually these cryptoclowns will hit a frequency the FCC will rue and then we will finally have some much needed respite of this hype as they are shut down, hard.

<comment><USER18> The article cited says the FCC has already started: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/02/bitco...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/02/bitcoin-miner-in-nyc-home-interfered-with-t-mobile-network- fcc-says/)

The crackdown can't happen soon enough!</comment></comment>


The true story of Nintendo's most coveted game - r-w http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/18121761/the-true-story-nintendo-most-coveted-game <comment><AUTHOR> Articles like this always make me wonder about how collectors preserve electronics for the ages. Will this cartridge still be in top condition in 50 years, or will it be a pile of rusty parts?

<comment><USER2> At least with video games, it can all be emulated and will never die. The physical cartridge is but a mortal shell...

<comment><USER3> That requires sufficient interest for people to come up with a perfect emulator for the system before the original hardware becomes too inconvenient to use for reference. And that can take a while - Dolphin only just became able to run all GC games a few months ago, for example, and it still has inaccuracies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I chuckled pretty good when I found out the couple lives in Gastonia and found the game not far from there. I can vouch that you can find some obscure but amazing used NES games in that area. Spent an entire summer in high school doing that (for fun though, not profit).</comment>


Increasing usuabily in your game's design - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4110/upping_your_games_usability.php

<comment><USER2> I wish HN had a way to save links like reddit does. Posting here so I can track the article later when I arrive home.

<comment><USER3> If you vote an article up, it appears in your profile under a "saved" heading.</comment></comment>


Asshole Driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://scottberkun.com/2007/asshole-driven-development/ <comment><USER2> There seems to have been an influx of these sort of posts on HN recently.

To be honest, engineers are just people. A wide sample of folks from different backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, educational-backgrounds, etc etc.

This wildcard lumping of people into various categories has got to stop. It's ridiculous to say the least, and really does the profession harm when you separate the engineer from the _individual_ in question.

People are different.

<comment><USER3> I find it interesting that; "He worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003, mostly on Internet Explorer 1.0 to 5.0 (not 6)" ...

<comment><USER4> That sure makes it sound like IE6 was a pariah project. It's the sort of thing that makes people go out of their way to say "I had no part in the making of that monster".

Hmm. More Bozo Loop material.

<comment><USER5> _Pariah project_? People forget IE6 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6> was released in 2000 freaking one, for Christ's sake. It was state of the art for years. Sure it started becoming a pain in the ass to developers years later, but it's only a pariah project with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and years of continued engineering development.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but it became SUCH a pain in the ass later on that it's entirely understandable that people would later on not want to be associated with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article missed CADT: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html>

<comment><USER8> That's a great article, thanks!

"...and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version"

It's even worse than that:

\- The new version might have new bugs that the old version didn't have.

\- The new version might not have all the features you've come to depend on in the old version.

\- The new version might have APIs or syntax that are not compatible with the old version.

<comment><USER9> I like to say "Rewrote it? So now its bigger, slower and more expensive!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There should be a name for these types of articles: Pigeonhole Driven Discussion.

</comment><comment><USER11> Where is Know-it-All Driven Development? Oh wait.

</comment><comment><USER12> You just need to find another job. Those don't sound like forms of development, just unprofessional people making bad decisions. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER13> CYAE has been a dominant force in government for years now.

</comment><comment><USER14> We implement ADD, CDD, CYAE extensively in our company ..</comment>


Ask HN: What sort of startup talk is allowed at work? - <AUTHOR>

I was talking to some business friends of mine, and they were very dumbfounded about the claims that companies make about employee side projects.
To what degree am I allowed to focus on my startup at work? I never write code, but I do ask technical questions on freenode about setups and favorites ycombinator articles.
Am I being paranoid? I'm just worried, because I run a blog under the same nick (not this one), and any competent googler will show me asking questions at work pertinent to my startup.
Probably a stupid question, but I'd really appreciate any links/knowledge drops. I think I'm being paranoid, but I don't know. <comment><USER2> _To what degree am I allowed to focus on my startup at work?_

You are being paid to help their business grow, not yours. Give it a little perspective. If your startup succeeded, would you want employees planning their own startups while you pay them?

<comment><AUTHOR> So you don't read HN at work?

<comment><USER2> I don't have access to a computer at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Legally (though IANAL): create no IP, do no customer support, don't do any real "work".

Ethically: don't be abusive. You're being paid to do a job, so the standard work ethic applies. Some personal stuff is expected and reasonable.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best place to start tech blog? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN community!
I'm recently thinking about starting my own tech blog, or simply a place, where I can drop tech-related articles. The main goal is to build my online presence, keep the track of the things I work on or issues I come across - so I can use it later on to laverage the recruitement process.
I'm looking for a kind of aggregate, like Medium, to reach as many people as possible. Recently I found Steemit idea quite interesting, but I fell it's not that much popular.
I wonder what sites you can recommend :) BR, Przemek, Poland <comment><USER2> Hey,

You should start your own blog on your own domain, and cross-post it to dev.to / Medium publication (like Hacker Noon) dev.to is becoming more and more popular, really easy to use, it supports markdown and they don't mind cross- posting (with a nice canonical URL to your own blog so that it doesn't affect your SEO).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your recommendation @ksahin, I'll check that out! ;)</comment></comment>


Ask: What are some of the scientific theories useful in life and career context? - <AUTHOR>

10,000 hours of deliberate practice is one of the useful theories I've encountered  http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u81/Ericsson__Roring__and_Nandagopal__2007_.pdf
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=1993-40718-001
Are there any other theories you would add to this list ?
Any theories related to the following framework would be useful too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P21_Skills.jpg
http://www.p21.org/overview/skills-framework
http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf <comment><USER2> Don't know if this is what you're looking for, or if it counts as scientific or Buddhist, but:

The immense scale of the universe. The sheer size of it gives me both hope, in that there's so much out there to learn and discover, and calmness, in that my problems are petty and not worth getting upset about. Reading about astronomical and physics theories sparks this feeling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spaced Repetiton learning techniques: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>

<comment><USER4> Do you know an iOS app using this? I see Anki on a quick google. Any good?</comment></comment>


Go is on a trajectory to become the next enterprise programming language - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/go-is-on-a-trajectory-to-become-the-next-enterprise-programming-language-3b75d70544e <comment><USER2> Dupe. Original discussion here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19675955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19675955)

</comment><comment><USER3> "immature libraries"

Nope.</comment>


The defunct language of nautical flags - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/18/at-sea/ <comment><USER2> Far from defunct, these flags (and some others) are the only way you will receive communication from officials during most sailboat races.

Some key ones are here: [http://abyc.co.za/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/ISAF_RRS_2013-2...](http://abyc.co.za/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/ISAF_RRS_2013-2016_2.jpg)

If you know these well you may pick up a win from time to time when your competitor fails to read the flags and does something wrong.

But do note the context dependence as mentioned in TFA. The "L" flag on a race course may mean "Follow this boat" or "There is a notice posted here," but on the open sea it means "Stop immediately," and in port it means "We are diseased."

Ain't nobody got time to spell things out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flags are still very much used around the world.

Visual signalling leaves no trace and can only be seen by those who you can see. Radio transmissions can be detected by sensors you don't know are present. This is useful for navies.

They're reasonably quick, reliable and transcend language barriers.

They also work well as a broadcast method - you can hoist Flag Alpha and every ship in visual range will know you that have a diver in the water and to use caution in your vicinity, you don't need to create excess chatter by announcing it on radio every 5 minutes.

Also, when you need a laugh during a long and boring watch you can get someone junior on the bridge to read out the ICS definition for Single Letter Signal Flag Zulu.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. As someone who lives on navigable river, it's not uncommon for me to see boats flying signal flags for variety of reasons. There's not a wide range of usage here mind you - it's typically tugs and workboats flying the RY signal (you should proceed at slow speed when passing me), survey vessels flying IR (I am engaged in submarine survey work) or cruise ships flying the H signal (I have a pilot on board).

Naval vessels are kind of an interesting case though. They also fly the H flag when they have a pilot on board, but when they do so it's in combination with the answering pennant at the top of the hoist. I believe this is a standard practice when communicating with merchant marine vessels to indicate that the signal is based on the ICS rules and not the naval signal book which can mean something completely different. Naval vessels also often display their call sign using these signal flags when arriving and departing from port.

<comment><USER3> Code Hotel distinguishes "I have a pilot on board" from Hotel meaning "I am conducting rotary-wing flying operations".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "defunct" term is an exaggeration allowed due to the fact that the blog audience is composed of "creative" people with focus on fiction and poetry, as you can see from the referenced "Code Poems" work by Hannah Weiner; the author provided an introduction and a not-so-unrealistic status of their use (it isn't a defunct language because you are requested to know them in order to get a boating license; source: I got mine early this year).

I think that @prismatic posted it here on HN because there are people who doesn't know them and are likely to be interested (other than being bewitched by the use proposed by Mrs Weiner).

<comment><USER6> Great that it was posted. I personally am pretty interested in signal flags (possibly thanks to reading about their evolution in the fictional world of Safehold book series), and I particularly liked the idea at the end of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like the only appropriate chance I've ever had to plug Monty Python's "The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqiUGjghlzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqiUGjghlzU)

(Starts about a minute in.)

</comment><comment><USER8> If this subject interests you, I recommend checking out Andrew Gordon's wonderful book _The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command_ ([https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Game-Jutland-British- Command/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Game-Jutland-British- Command/dp/1557509719)), which (among other things) goes into great detail on how complicated the Royal Navy's system of flag signaling had become by the turn of the 20th century, the efforts of some brilliant officers to simplify it, and the disastrous wartime results that came because others clung too hard to the positions of influence mastering that system had won them in peacetime to see that it was completely unworkable in war. It's a fascinating portrait of how technical innovation and institutional inertia can collide, and what happens when inertia is allowed to win.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nautical flags are still used for almost all of competitive sailing.

They work exceptionally well. Sailboat races are typically started between an anchored boat with a flag and an anchored buoy. There is a countdown with sound signals and flags. If the race committee decides to enact a special starting rule, they do so with a signal flag. If a boat has started early, it's indicated by a signal flag.

I'm 30 and in my life in my local fleet handheld VHFs have become popular, but even so signal flags are not going anywhere.

I can recall and draw much of the alphabet because of this: B, C, I, L, N, Z, X, S, Y, P, 1st repeater and 2nd repeater are all vital in sailboat racing.

</comment><comment><USER10> It might seem outdated but still in use today. When entering a new country you still need to fly the Q (yellow) flag till you cleared customs / immigration.

</comment><comment><USER11> I bought a fixed string of signal flags for my boat from West Marine for decoration. Invariably, someone will ask what it means. The fun part is leading them on with something ridiculous, like, "Cocktails at 5", or "We're sinking". Otherwise, as a sailor who has thousands of deep water miles sailing in many countries, I have never learned or used the system.

</comment><comment><USER12> Off all things this brings to mind watching animated Tintin as a kid. At one point they are flown ahead of a ship, and is waiting in harbor for it to land. As they wait Haddock is watching these flags, only to observe them signal that the ship is found to have a infectious disease on board.

</comment><comment><USER13> On holidays and other special occasions, Navy ships will hoist a rainbow array of signal flags up and over the mast to look pretty. (Full dress ship, [0])

The flags for full dress ship are not chosen by the ship, however. They are mandated by an instruction and all ships have to use the same flags. ([1], paragraph 705)

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to discern why this is so.

[0][https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NCQZv5iFk-4/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NCQZv5iFk-4/maxresdefault.jpg)

[1][http://www.ushistory.org/Betsy/images/ntp13b.pdf](http://www.ushistory.org/Betsy/images/ntp13b.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Is it because if the crew could choose the flag order, they could have it spell something unfortunate?

<comment><USER13> Bingo!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maritime flags were first generalized by Frederick Marryat.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_flag_signalling#Mar...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_flag_signalling#Marryat.27s_Code_of_Signals)

Marryat as well as being a distinguished naval officer was a fine writer. _Mister Midshipman Easy._ By comparison, Patrick O'Brien wasn't even a sailor. He was a genre writer. The parallel would be Arthur C Clarke vs Ray Bradbury. Clark proposed geostationary satellites and EME in one article, _Extra- Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?_

<comment><USER16> > [Patrick O'Brien] was a genre writer.

He is known for much more than his historical novels, including translations and biographies.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_O%27Brian#Bibliography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_O%27Brian#Bibliography)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yep, flags are still in use.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fundroid30...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fundroid3000.navalflags)

There's even an app!

</comment><comment><USER18> Naval units operating in formation still use signal flags.</comment>


Linux App Store: A Centralized Hub for Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage Apps - <AUTHOR> https://linuxappstore.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> OMG! Ubuntu!'s write-up:

[https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/05/the-linux-app-store- webs...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/05/the-linux-app-store-website-lets- you-find-apps-wherever)

Source code (GPLv3):

[https://github.com/linuxappstore/linuxappstore- frontend](https://github.com/linuxappstore/linuxappstore-frontend)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm just a casual Linux user, but I'm wondering: is there a demand for this? I've been using Linux Mint and it already comes with a pseudo store. Everything else that I've been installing was one apt-get command away. Is this meant to make Linux more accessible to people who don't currently use it?

<comment><AUTHOR> These new software packaging systems (Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage) offer several benefits:

\- All dependencies bundled in one package, which eliminates dependency hell

\- Delta updates for smaller and faster application updates

\- Software developers can support all Linux distributions with one release, instead of repackaging their software multiple times

\- Application sandboxing for additional security (only for Flatpak, Snap with AppArmor, and AppImage with Firejail)

\- The entire application is contained in one file (only for AppImage)

The various app stores (Ubuntu Software Center, GNOME Software, and KDE Discover) already support either Flatpak or Snap, which would make Linux software more accessible to users who prefer a graphical interface for software management.

<comment><USER3> Only downside I see is that you end up with many repeat dependencies, which takes up more space than the alternative. Still pretty great for a personal Linux machine more easily maintained by the user, but not so great for other machines with more limited resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was not able to find any mention about integrity. Is there any document explaining how/when/... all packages and "deltas" are sealed? Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Flatpak: [http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic- concepts.html](http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html) and [http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/under-the- hood.html](http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/under-the-hood.html)

Snap: [https://docs.snapcraft.io/snap-format](https://docs.snapcraft.io/snap- format) and [https://docs.snapcraft.io/snap- confinement](https://docs.snapcraft.io/snap-confinement)

AppImage: [https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageSpec/blob/master/draft.m...](https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageSpec/blob/master/draft.md)

If you're looking for something else, please say so and I'll try to find the right information.</comment></comment>


Freenode Spam Attack - <AUTHOR> http://blog.freenode.net/2010/01/javascript-spam/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently there is come strange ctcp traffic going around that is causing me to constantly get bounced from freenode. Anyone know how to change ctcp settings in bip?</comment>


Python 3.7.4 is now available - <AUTHOR> https://blog.python.org/2019/07/python-374-is-now-available.html <comment><USER2> -X dev and -X importtime: [https://docs.python.org/3.7/using/cmdline.html#id5](https://docs.python.org/3.7/using/cmdline.html#id5)</comment>


Legacy systems are everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://trackchanges.postlight.com/legacy-systems-are-everywhere-dddccf08bf6e <comment><USER2> Reminds of when I started reading Code Complete. The construction analogy really helped me conceptualize the difference between making a personal one- off project (like a shed) and an hardened mission-critical system requiring test suites for everything. (building NORAD). Not everything needs to be a TDD, elegant haiku.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's true: and everything we're working on now will be considered legacy in 3-5 years time, and the devs working on it then will be moaning about all the short-sighted decisions we made. Believe it.

<comment><USER4> Im doing this now. The moaning that is. But the worst part is I'm seeing the names of people who gave birth to my problems on new projects. Lets hope they learned something.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately for me the wazzock who wrote the code is me, 4 years ago. What A DoucheBag.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes. "What the heck is this!? Who wrote this garbage??" ... runs git blame ... "...shit."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Full regression tests are hard enough in software, but I can't imagine > trying to run through a "make sure everything in the house works" checklist > in meatspace.

Interestingly, this is exactly what you do when you rent a boat, and also what owner does later when you return it. You go through a checklist and manually test and mark each feature. Kind of like manually running functional tests, except it's in a real world. :)

<comment><USER8> Very true.

I would offer an airplane also as an example. First thing you do is walk the plane making a complete circle checking items off with a visual inspection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Alternate title and TL;DR: Troubleshooting systems is the same across all domains.

</comment><comment><USER10> The author's name is Drew Bell, and the article is about a doorbell.

Nominative determinism!

</comment><comment><USER11> Loading slowly for me. Archive: [http://archive.fo/6qtjf](http://archive.fo/6qtjf)</comment>


Ask HN: How did you teach yourself a second language? - <AUTHOR> Without formal education/classes, what are the best ways to become fluent in another language? I would like to increase my ability to speak German and begin to learn Russian by using many different resources. Advice? <comment><USER3> Okay you gotta immerse yourself as much as possible.

From experience, you gotta learn that language is like a filter through which ones' mind/heart/intentions are shaped. Then, you master getting into the pre- language state of mind that has no language, and from there you train yourself to see the world with a different organization of concepts.

First, learn the 200 most common words in the language. Do whatever it takes to learn all the verb conjugations. Spend countless hours listening to real humans talk in conversation and repeat exactly as well as you can over the tracks whilst listening (like singing along to a song) so you can master the ups and downs of tonation in pronunciation.

Top 2 tips: One) 15 minutes every day is worth so much more than 150 minutes in one day every 10 days. Meaning: frequency is key, and quality over quantity.

Two) to truly become "fluent," that is, to make the leap from "this is something I can use" to "re-experiencing life through the frame of a German person / Japanese person / Swedish person / whatever" you must spend time in a place culturally saturated in the language.

That said, you can spend 2-3 years of your life immersing yourself in radio, news, television, movies, and learning mnemonic methods (whacky stories and images that help you retain meanings) and make incredible progress.

<comment><USER4> I've recently moved from Scotland to Finland, and I agree with your post 100%. Immersion is what made me learn more than anything else - just being able to pronounce the difference between "o" and "ö" was hard at first, but with more exposure it became natural.

I'd also suggest learning sets of words, as you say the most common. I started with days of the week, months of the year, numbers up to 20, and similar.

Though I'd probably suggest having lessons, be they official at a college/university/academic location, or low-key chats with locals over coffee/beer/cake is a good thing to do. I had a lot of questions about grammar and how to chain words that were easily resolved with chat.

<comment><USER5> I second your lesson suggestion. I was lucky enough to have lessons, and was very happy I did.

That said, if one can't do the lessons, I fully suggest working through some of the adult learner workbooks - the ones for immigrants. Some are more grammar-heavy than others. The draw is twofold: You learn some common speaking terms plus you get introduced to grammar, complete with exercises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Immersion helps.

But outside of that, there are some great suggestions. A few things I have to suggest:

Get ahold of some of the books and workbooks for adult learners. This is an easy way to learn grammar and common phrases. I'd use these in conjunction with other things.

Next, watch children's cartoons. Here (Norway), adult films often simply have subtitles and leave the English audio, but children's shows are dubbed with simple words and clear language. It is a bonus if it is a crossover - <USER2> watched many hours of "Spiderman" cartoons in Norwegian.

Read books, especialy ones you've read in English. Harry Potter, for example, is available in multiple languages. It'll be difficult at first, but you'll increase vocabulary from the repetition in the book. Terry Pratchett is another choice for German, at least (I can find some in Norwegian).

For speaking, Skype is popular for tutoring and speaking practice, though you might have to pay for this.

Good luck :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wasted 8 years studying English at school without being able to write this sentence (I'm sure I'm still making mistakes but you get the idea.) I could read basic software documentation and school books, but nothing real. Then I subscribed to Newsweek and started playing Nethack. Both built my vocabulary. Reading Newsweek was a pain at first, one article per week with the dictionary constantly open. Eventually that let me read anything. A couple of years of English courses paid by my company made me able to understand people. I understood 50% before that. Then the Internet, movies, TV.

If you're not in Germany or Russia, get a teacher with a small class. Mine was 4 people so we could speak and exercise a lot.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have started learning French few months ago. I started with Duolingo for couple of weeks to get the basics. I liked there tutorials. The APP even has a built-in messenger where you can chat in French with a bot(guessing same for German too).

The first book I read was Beauty and the beast in french. It's a short story to start with. It took me a long time to just read some sentences with proper pronunciation and I'm still working on it. I look up youtube videos for some extra info. The frenchpod101 videos are good. I guess you might have already tried these, but just wanted to mention it anyways. Hope this helps! Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> Move there, live there. If there or not, a recent link from HN is global radio. Plenty of talk stations in different languages and dialects. [http://radio.garden/live/](http://radio.garden/live/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've had success with Duolingo.

I've been doing Duolingo's French lessons every day for 15-20 minutes during my commute to work. I find it quite engaging and useful.

<comment><USER10> I second Duolingo, and I also did it while commuting. I used it to learn rudimentary Russian, but it was enough to roughly understand the people there. Build your language skills from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Find shows, movies, music that interest you. Watch them (with subtitles). Listen to it.

A lot of language learning exists below the "level" of words and sentences. The sound of a language.

And even when you progress to words and sentences, phrases, idioms, and the like differ. Gender exists, or differs. Native speakers don't memorize these. They learn by absorption. You are fortunate in that, with today's connected world, so can you.

P.S. The rest of it, e.g. working through texts, tutoring videos, and all that, I leave to you. Just remember: EXPOSURE. And that you can't and shouldn't try to consciously process and monitor it all. Steep yourself in it, and let your whole mind (including sub-conscious, or whatever we're calling it) process it.

P.P.S. Approach it this way, and you will find that some of the "much harder than when a child" belief doesn't actually really of fully apply. I became conversational in French, starting from zero, in about seven weeks when I was 22. In the middle of Vermont.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thirty minutes of TV every day. I'd pick a character and repeat all their lines after they delivered them. It helped me wrap my mind around the rhythm of the language and form words, prior to understanding anything. That, and a good grammar and dictionary for reference.

</comment><comment><USER13> Rosetta Stone online. For me, picture-based learning seems to work well.

I also use online flashcards (Anki can be a useful tool for making your own online flashcard decks).

</comment><comment><USER14> Live there. Immersion. Anything else is a distant 2nd and you will never "feel" the language.

</comment><comment><USER15> ajatt.com

</comment><comment><USER16> I use Benny Lewis's advice (He founded FluentIn3Months). You can even use services like FluentU or Duolingo.</comment>


Meet 'Sirius' Martti, Satoshi's First Contributor to Bitcoin, Next Week in SF - <AUTHOR> Without Martti 'Sirius' Malmi, Bitcoin may never have gotten off the ground - according to The Verge, Business Insider, Reddit, and the git history itself.
While usually a quiet, lone wolf out in Finland, Martti has joined the decentralized Open Source project GUN, which is ranked* #2 in Blockchain technologies. We have flown him out to the Bay Area for a visit, meet with developers and the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities.
Come hear the inside story of how Satoshi came to trust him with the Bitcoin domains, how he ran the bitcointalk forums, built the GUI that made Bitcoin usable by non-programmers, wrote some of the earliest C++ code, and even performed the very first Bitcoin to USD exchange in history - approximately 5K BTC for $5 via PayPal.
If you are in the Bay Area and can come in person to SF, please RSVP at https://www.facebook.com/events/159991728160665/ .
For everybody else, please give us a shout if you want us to do a livestream so we know to prioritize it.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/10/8751933/the-shy-college-student-who-helped-build-bitcoin-into-a-global http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoins-martti-malmi-not-worried-about-liberty-reserve-2013-5 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/39azff/martti_malmi_basically_for_the_first_year_2009_i/ https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/71085/why-does-the-beginning-of-git-log-for-the-bitcoin-source-on-github-say-sirius https://github.com/topics/blockchain <comment><USER2> Periscope the whole thing, no matter how long. I'm sure it will be insightful beginning to end. I will try to be there. I suggest reaching out to the Bitcoin Meetup guys. We meet up at El Rio once a month [https://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin- Social/](https://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/)</comment>


Can't Get Tenure? Then Get a Real Job - T-A http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-03/can-t-get-tenure-then-get-a-real-job.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if there people hiring from the flood of PhDs coming out of the educational system.</comment>


Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? - <AUTHOR> https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338 <comment><USER3> Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any potential fear of economic pain. Regret being one of the most powerful emotional responses that we have.

We don't have to look far in any direction for solutions that improve our education systems, our research output, and the general welfare of humanity. Unfortunately, the forces of corruption will always be strong, and it will take a more creative and imaginative people to implement them.

<comment><USER4> > Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited > to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and > tighter.

An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at places where there are few new ideas to be found.

If we stop equating "tech" with computers, and instead search the vast parameter space of new technologies, we'll quickly find lots of interesting new ideas. Unfortunately, that also means we've more or less reach the end of the growth era of Silicon Valley, and from here on out SV just becomes another old fashion industry with minimal avenues for new growth.

<comment><USER5> There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone with the right design and software skills to come by, make the investment, and grab the business.

If you are lacking in inspiration, go work for a consulting company for a year and your idea bucket will be full to overflowing.

<comment> aaron-lebo This was originally in response to your parent, but gonna attach it to your comment instead, cause you're right.

I don't believe we've found the low-hanging fruit at all, it's still all over the place.

There are hundreds of pieces of software and hardware that are expensive, or unintuitive, or user-hostile, many are all of the above. HN complains every day about bad software. Is this really the best we've got?

There's just no way. What it does take is people willing to take a step off the usual treadmill and getting their talent and ability sucked into large companies and willing to take a risk to build their own stuff. That ability is there, the will is not. Some people have 30,000 HN comments. You're telling me 10k of those detailed thoughtful comments aren't absorbing time that can be put into building better stuff?

Hardware is thousands of times more powerful and cheaper than it was 20 years ago. Software is likewise more capable, or at the very least, libraries are way more abundant.. Say what you want about new languages, but I'll take the option of Rust, Nim, Go, Clojure, etc, than what existed 15 years ago any day. Not that that stuff was bad, but today you have the option, and it's fucking cheap to build.

Why aren't we building? Why do we act like we need millions of dollars in funding to do stuff you can do in your underwear? Do we really believe all the good ideas are gone or have been executed well? That seems crazy to me. I just think we're lacking imagination and we've adopted a woe is me attitude (I know I struggle with this all the time).

That's just software, where greenfield stuff is cheaper than anything in the world, where implementing your thoughts is a matter of sitting down. If you've worked in any business, you know of the inefficiencies within, and if you've worked in a big one, you really know about them.

There is so much low hanging fruit! Just about any product you can pick up in your house, any regular process you go through, there's a major opportunity to look at that and think about how that can be done better and cheaper and more reliably. What's more, that's about the easiest thing to do, because it's just working off what already exists.

Sorry if I'm not more specific, but there's gonna be people looing back in ten or twenty or two years and wondering how so many people missed x or y or z, which in retrospect is so obvious.

<comment><USER6> I think its a case of diminishing returns - yes there is sucky legacy software everywhere, but the ROI was much greater when introducing software in a space where there was none, or the incumbent system hasn't met growing needs.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. We're not finding something as big as the Internet again. Smartphones more or less look like the same across generations now. Innovation seems to be much more gradual than it use to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article says... "that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply". No surprise there. Nowadays, Universities have to become paper mills in order to get funding. Also... Risky research and cross disciplinary research is a sure fire way not to get tenure.

As to the question, where new ideas come from... I teach creativity... the literature is in near agreement on this topic. New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas. Essentially, this is an act of playful association. New Ideas also come from new technologies. For example... the neodymium magnet is the reason we had the Sony Walkman.

<comment><USER8> "New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas."

Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because there are more combinations of old ideas?

<comment><USER9> It also means that patents restrict the flow of new ideas by locking up the source material for invention.

The idea that invention is a isolated creative force that pops up without dependency on anything else has always been a myth without foundation.

<comment><USER10> I've become extremely interested in this notion lately. When I have discussions about intellectual property with random people the dominant idea is that patent promote innovation. People get angry if I suggest that might not be true, as if they think I want all creative people to go bankrupt or something.

But its increasingly questionable to me. Open source software has shown the great wealth of innovation that occurs when we collaborate instead of hiding our work.

I think we could (probably) sharply increase the rate of innovation if we let go of intellectual property restrictions. I really want economists and other thinkers to take seriously this notion that intellectual property restrictions are deeply harmful to society and study it in detail. Unfortunately entrenched interests benefit from the status quo (naturally) and I feel they would be in opposition here. But we can still work to open source our output. It's harder when open source competes with closed source, but if we can learn how to use open source to our advantage we might be able to win.

In any case I think it is desperately important that we take seriously the idea that IP laws might be doing more harm than good. Most people I speak to take it as a given that we need them, and I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

<comment><USER11> How do you solve for 'work for 5 years on open source project, get it to some degree of popularity, watch AWS making a service out of your code without paying you a dime'?

<comment><USER12> A new licensing model where it's prohibitive to make a profit off of this work.

<comment><USER13> And without any intellectual property rights, what prevents someone from simply ignoring the license?

<comment><USER14> Exactly! Only because of IP rights you can enforce a license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The funny thing about inventions is that nobody needs them until they have it. So throwing more and more researchers at one topic won't change anything as long as there won't be adaptation of this research. In my opinion there are too many inventions and not much products around them that people want to use. Adaptation is often correlated with business need. So adaptation is the biggest problem right now cause as soon as people start using invention they will tell if this is improving their lives or it's stupid idea. We don't need more researchers we need more testers and producers and here comes availability. When researcher put patent on his research availability is near zero so invention is stopped in time. Also don't forget about : Great Inventions Are Often Overlooked.

<comment><USER16> Countepoint: Covid-19 vaccine

<comment><USER15> What's your point because if it will start mutate too fast at this point you need to produce vaccine for every mutation that is deadly. For example flu vaccine is produced twice a year and not for every strain only for those that are most dangerous. Maybe there is need to develop new protection techniques instead of injecting dead virus into human body. Over the years it might become true that only way for human to survive on this planet is gene editing like CRISPR. There are already first trials to edit genes of adult human that you can read about here: [https://ir.editasmedicine.com/news-releases/news- release-det...](https://ir.editasmedicine.com/news-releases/news-release- details/allergan-and-editas-medicine-announce-dosing-first-patient)

<comment><USER16> The point is, there's a need for the covid-19 vaccine before they invent it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some time in (I think) the past few months, someone posted a link to an AT&T or Bell Labs executive talking to a team of his engineers about the state of innovation at the phone company. The context was the 1970s, and a number of innovations -- direct dialing and touch-tone dialing were I believe two of them. It transpired that these had been. developed _decades_ before deployment -- direct dialing being a 19th century invention, touch tone from the 1920s or 30s, as I recall.

The upshot being that innovation had already slowed tremendously.

The video begins, approximately, with the speaker relating a story of how an earlier executive had announced to a previous group, "Gentlemen, this company was destroyed last night".

If this rings any. bells, Ma or otherwise, I'd appreciate the link or reference.

<comment><USER18> I am pretty sure you are referring to Russ Ackoff's lecture about his time at Bell Labs: [https://vimeo.com/148192220](https://vimeo.com/148192220)

(If you haven't already read it and are interested in Bell Labs, 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner is worth checking out.)

<comment><USER17> Bingo! That's it, thanks so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> NB: the title is misleading. this is not about pure ideas, this is about _economic_ growth, which to be measurable (significant) needs to be exponential.

no doubt, there are _more_ ideas now than ever. technology is a great enabler. but finding _economically_ impactful ideas ... that does seem to be getting harder, from my armchair view.

<comment><USER20> Value of ideas is massively overstated in biz school lit, imo... Ideas are fine, but it takes a lot of work to prove that one actually works, and then a lot more work to bring it to production.

All of the work involved needs financial and material support to happen. It's easy to have an armchair idea, but to put a hundred+ hours into the very first realization is extremely difficult if it's not your day job. (And repeat for the thousands(?) of hours necessary for bringing to market...)

In my most anti-elitist frame of mind, I expect there's a mismatch between who has good ideas and who has time to prove things out... Elite business schools are populated (on average) by walking Dunning-Krueger effects, powered by trust funds and lack of consequences: of course they have a shortage of good ideas... Meanwhile people with the actual experience and expertise to produce good ideas have day jobs to keep them from executing.

<comment><USER21> This. It's also worth remembering that the cost to bring products to market - particularly in the software/technology industry, continues to rise. As larger players continue to expand their portfolio of offerings with years of engineering effort behind them, it's significantly more difficult for a small startup to produce something compelling enough for customers to use it over the other options on the market.

In other words, the bar for quality and capability in all products we use on a daily basis continues to rise. That has the direct effect of raising the expectations that consumers and businesses have for new products they want to purchase, and thus the cost to build them. That translates to more time needed to deliver something meaningful to market, which is also likely correlated with higher amounts of VC funding concentrated in a smaller number of companies (pre-COVID)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The problem isn't finding ideas, but finding ideas that other people haven't already thought and wrote about, or patented. Indeed, the crawl to the precipice of knowledge in a domain can take years. There are only so many shortcuts, no matter how much pruning of the tree of knowledge you do, the path will only get longer. In fact, a great deal of effort goes into re- inventing the discoveries of others, hidden from them by language, disciplinary perspective.

</comment><comment><USER23> It may just be a change in the way that we work. This paper may just as well be titled "Are institutions getting less effective?" or "Are research institutions getting less effective?". Hell, it might even be that our smartest people aren't researching and the amount of brainpower we throw at research problems has actually decreased even though the effort/money we throw at research problems has increased.

<comment><USER24> _It may just be a change in the way that we work. This paper may just as well be titled "Are institutions getting less effective?" or "Are research institutions getting less effective?"._

Lots of progress might be stymied by entrenched interests using laws, regulations, or some form of corporate bureaucracy/cronyism as a "moat" to ward off competition.

The short shrift paid to EVs by auto makers and car dealers before Tesla came along is one example. (Yes, I know that batteries also had to improve.) Intel's practices before AMD stepped up its game recently can be seen as another example. Then there's SpaceX.

 _Hell, it might even be that our smartest people aren 't researching and the amount of brainpower we throw at research problems has actually decreased_

Is research now a "2nd tier" career? Are you thinking this is based on economic competition from industry?

<comment><USER25> Research is a privilege

<comment><USER26> What do you mean? I don't understand what you're trying to say about the parent comment.

<comment><USER27> My read of his comment is that fruitful research was historically done by people within the aristocracy after their fundamental needs for comfort were met.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps.

In my mind, it seems there's no such thing as an "original" idea, given that all ideas are made from or composed of other ideas (as that's how you describe them). Therefore originality, seems to be just a new combination of old ideas you've already been exposed to.

As an example, can you ever imagine a color that's not composed of a combination of colors you've already seen before? A truly original color?

Otherwise, if you're trying to communicate an idea to another, and cannot describe the idea using existing ideas, it might be considered truly original. But what does one do in this case? You show or demonstrate it to them...

As so, ideas seemingly come from observation - or more specifically - <USER2> senses, and any subsequent ideas built from thereof.

Thus, if there's a limit to we can sense and observe, then ideas would also be limited or "finite", and we would naturally find ideas becoming "harder to find" eventually...

I believe Ludwig Wittgenstein mentioned something like this in his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

<comment><USER29> I see where you are coming from and I get that your argument is that new ideas are (?often) extension of existing ones but I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. It seems like everything can be described as an abstraction of something else on a larger/smaller scale. Which philosophically would mean that the universe as a whole has the same value as any atom or quarks within it.

But even if we ignore the philosophical aspect of it, it seems a bit like Duell's "Everything that can be invented has been invented" statement from late 19-th/early 20-th century. A statement which hasn't aged too well for better or worse.

<comment><USER28> > I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. It seems like everything can > be described as an abstraction of something else

Correct, any new ideas you abstract are composed of pre-existing ideas you have. Trace any of those ideas to their roots and you'll realize all ideas come from what you originally had to subject your senses to (i.e seeing it, hearing it), otherwise they're some abstracted combination thereof.

Although my prior post was an attempt at a logical proof of sorts, the only real caveat I find in it, is this part: _if there 's a limit to what we can sense and observe_. This is not proven as far I can tell (which is why I prefaced it with an 'if').

Again, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein's work may say all of this better, but then again I find it hard to grasp everything it tries to convey.

EDIT: As for Duell's statement, perhaps it's taken too literally. I can see they had an equivalent to email (e.g. regular mail), atom bombs (regular bombs) and AI (basic schemes & algorithms) back in those days, just not _literal_ equivalents. But his statement is not the argument I'm making in my prior post. Rather it's more "our ideas are limited by what we sense".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Its kind of understandable isn't it? The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if you will. Unfortunately going up the stack means one needs to get more and more educated or in some cases need to embed themselves in a specific context. But in general though, people are naturally ingenious, they will always come up with new ideas.

In the most recent past, the one "low tech" idea that blew me away is the concept of influencers. People understood Instagram and then understood the general psychology of people and then exploited it to create vast empires. I mean previously clout was something only celebrities had after doing extraordinary things like act in movies or be the best in the world in what they do. But people found a way to commoditize it and democratize it. And they didn't need any formal education for it. All they needed was a phone.

<comment><USER31> _The easiest problems get solved first, so people have to "go up the stack" if you will._

The implication of this is that we're running out of problems to solve, and eventually we'll have fixed everything. That ignores the fact that a solution to a problem very often creates new problems, and some of them will be equivalent to the previous easy problems. In some fields you could be solving the "easy" problems forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There's certainly phases of progress in particular fields. e.g. in physics, we had relativity and quantum mechanics... and no further revolutions for quite a while. If Einstein's genius made some of it possible... he also didn't make further progress. He was older yes, but also perhaps there was less to find? Other people were smart enough to find what he found, but weren't bold enough.

Looking at the bigger picture, Einstein had unexplained empirical evidence (speed of light constant in all directions, inconsistent with waves in an ether). So that was a driver.

Looking bigger again, even with better equipment, that senses further, we can only discover new things if they can be sensed with that equipment.

(Without evidence) my opinion is we will have periods of slow progress and periods of rapid progress. We are currently in a period of stagnation. We need empirical data, intelligent analysis, and boldness.

</comment><comment><USER33> The title is misleading and inflammatory: The article itself is making a much narrower claim about the monetary value (economic growth) derived from equivalent amounts of research effort.

In that context, they claim it takes more effort now than years ago to achieve the same level of economic benefit.

This is _far_ different than anything having to do with the # of "ideas", which is too abstract of a notion to be meaningful the way they use it.

Even if they're correct that it now takes more research to produce equivalent economic benefit, then through one concept of "idea" we actually have more than ever: researchers aren't doing the same bit of research over & over, they're doing new bits. Each bit easily fits into the concept of an "idea", and so in that sense ideas are plentiful, it just takes more of them than before to achieve a given level of economic growth.

</comment><comment><USER34> The pigeonhole principle [0] is also becoming more of a factor due to the sheer volume of production.

Especially in domains with a limited branching factor. For example, in music, if you only have 12 tones in an octave to play with, along with variable length and spacing, you start to run out of "good" melodies under 20 notes after 400 years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle)

<comment><USER35> Sure, but that's not accounting for rhythm, different instruments, etc.

<comment><USER34> Isn't this just increasing the branching factor? How hard will it be to find new melodies a million years from now? Easier than today, the same, or harder?

<comment><USER36> It is, but it is increasing the branching factor by much more than finding all the "good" melodies in 400 years.

Here's a good example of music that stands on it own right despite using the melody of despacito: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk) \- I'm pretty sure that most people at HN will appreciate this one whether they like despacito or not :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 Just look what it takes to have a good idea now.

A good example is astrophysics. There are so many nice theories around, but they are all wrong. If you want to theorycraft the universe now, you need to deal with an incredible amount of very precise data, advanced maths and billion dollar machines. If you don't, the best you get is to have you theory proven wrong by an actual specialist, most of the times it is "not even wrong".

Researchers are now working on a subdomain of a subdomain, and they spend decades studying just to reach the level where they can start having good ideas.

Most of the easy good ideas are already taken. What remain are the hard ones, and those that require a lot of luck and/or hard work to materialize.

<comment><USER37> I think this is slightly specific to astrophysics and cosmology. In Neuroscience, it definitely feels like there is plenty of headway to be made by individuals with good ideas, although I admit that it feels as though ideas are harder to come by as more is published and the bar is continually raised.

<comment><USER38> This is certainly also true of mathematics and many other areas that have over a century of modern research work done on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Had a similar discussion yesterday and I am aching for that conceptual freshness.

What are all the non-Elon, non-besos plebs going to do for a day job? Our industries are too mature for easy growth. Cars, computers, space are done for the plebs, we need another industry of easy growth to pull this ship along. If history repeats, manufacturing will become king again.

In the arts with near infinite creative control lately we are seeing many retreads of past ideas, we need some great fresh ideas.

Ai tooling and general purpose automation will kick off a customisable manufacturing system, but it's not enough. Where are all the brains at.... finance?

<comment><USER40> Few ideas:

Many personal robots and services - we'll do almost nothing. So we'll have more time for hobbies, which will need more tools etc .

Building a green economy.

Higher quality food more often.

More healthcare, with aging etc. And maybe more emphasis on selling care.

The real problem is this: why hire humans do all those jobs, when machines could do(or create substitutes) for most of those new jobs ?

<comment><USER39> Good machines compress time for tasks. Dishwashers still need human stackers despite reducing an all day job down by the river to 3mins of stacking/unstacking dishes.

Compressing design work from hours or weeks of thinking about different forms down to a few minutes of machine learning pattern recognition cpu cycles, means we have to move our knowledge work from massaging clay into new Porsche designs to higher level abstractions about what function in society cars can fulfill. The abstractions get higher, we can fit more into our time on this planet and the detailed oriented will be required to keep all of this from breaking down and succumbing to entropy.

Humans at the bottom of the chain will have nothing to do except hold the world together, people falling out of work, machines breaking and money and time being wasted away on excessive drug use and manufacturing for pleasure instead of progress too much can grind this potential for new life to a halt.

Agriculture is direly needed in the dirty thirties if we are to avoid repeating the hunger caused by the dust bowls in the 30s. A green base is fundamental to surviving the crash of the roaring twenties. Automating farming and increasing food production to multiple times of what the US can demand is a life saving purpose. God only hopes you have 'nothing' to do when it comes to crass commercial works. Building self sustainable farming for homes so that families can survive on and off grid is also has a potential for great application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> An alternate way to look at the problem is that perhaps we should be doing a better job of educating our children to absorb the existing state of knowledge. The hope would be that they are prepared to contribute new ideas before their naive optimism is crushed and they head toward seeking rent on old ideas. The underlying theory here is that new ideas are discovered by reinterpretration of the underlying data with a "purer" or partially forgotten version of previous explanations.

</comment><comment><USER41> Don't ideas naturally breed more ideas? Perhaps it takes a certain type of mind, but from my perspective, ideas are synthesized from life experience. That life experience could be prehistoric or modern, but the flow of information in life is going to generate ideas. Ideas are needed to solve problems, solving problems ensures survival, so we naturally think in terms of ideas much of the time.

Illustration: A prehistoric person invents the basket: They gather apples from a tree that is a mile from their cave, but can only carry 6 apples and must make several trips. On one trip, they pass a tree with a nest, the nest has eggs and the idea happens: eggs:apples, nest:[basket]. They fabricate a basket out of a hide, and can then get all the apples they need in one trip.

In Moore's law, I'd argue that keeping apace in fact requires many more ideas to get to the next node than it took to get to the current node. The fabrication complexity is exponentially greater, not linearly greater, and more ideas are required to get there. Getting to node x+1 indicates much greater progress than was seen getting to node x, because exponentially more ideas were required to succeed. Moreover, you had to have all the ideas of x to build on in order to get to x+1.

I argue that we are not generating fewer ideas as 'harder to find' would imply. But rather, exponentially more, and, the resulting achievements are all the more spectacular.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm reminded of the discovery of the 'modern' variation on the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm. Both the original algorithm, and the improvement made in the variation, are so simple that it can be trivially understood, and makes one think _Oh yeah. Neat. And kinda obvious._ (I'd forgotten the particulars so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Took me very little time to piece it back together.)

Clearly it's not _totally_ obvious, or it would have made its way into the original paper. Still, the barrier to a Wikipedia-worthy computer science discovery, has risen somewhat since then.

 _Edit_ Come to think of it, this is a good example for explaining what we mean by 'improved algorithm' to non-software folks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#Fisher_and_Yates'_original_method)

</comment><comment><USER43> Good ideas are easy to find in any niche, but the low central bank interest rates make price discovery extremely hard, so most of the time it's just not worth to implement those ideas, as people are not compensated well enough for executing on those ideas.

I believe that right now any project that gets people closer to hard money is a good direction.

<comment><USER44> Forgive me, but I don't understand your point. Is it that it's so easy to borrow money that there's no need to sift good ideas from bad? And if so, that seems like it would result in more bad ideas being funded, not fewer good ideas.

Yet the paper claims to present evidence to the contrary (sort of; they're talking about innovation gains, not "ideas")--that the cost of gains is increasing. I don't see how that would arise from low interest rates?

<comment><USER43> Money (in the form of buying power) can't be created from nothing, so whenever a bad idea/execution is funded, it takes away buying power from companies that have better execution, but less access to cheap loans.

As an example I personally know a CEO who had a great idea, great exececution, but a new competitor startup was funded with millions of dollars of cash that threatened to sue him in the US. He didn't have money for lawyers, so he became in a bad position very fast, even if he was quite certain that the competitor didn't have any case against him.

Another example is cheap loans driving up ad prices and rent in SF, which I have seen often talked about here.

<comment><USER45> Money _can_ be created from nothing.

[https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly- bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy)

<comment><USER43> I was specifically talking about money defined by the Austrian theory of money (buying power / store of value). Just because monetary units (currency) are created, it doesn't increase buying power of the total amount of the total amount of monetary units. For example if people buy houses from additionally created currency (even if it's debt), the buying power of one unit of that currency goes down, which can be seen by the number of required units needed to buy a house going up.

The problem with banks is that they have a good reason to conflate unit of account with store of value: they make lots of profit on people not understanding the difference.

<comment><USER46> Money is made up in all cases. It's an abstraction of relative demand. Even if governments abandoned fiat money, they could still pull money from thin air.

Mostly because governments use violence to change the relative price of anything. If a government made owning a gold coin or a bitcoin a crime punishable by death, I think its buying power would go down. Similarly, by forcing citizens to pay taxes in a specified currency at the threat of jail time, a new currency is created.

It's made up all the way down.

<comment><USER43> Sure, money is a man made belief, Yuval Noah Harari's books are great at explaining this :)

Generally gold confiscation doesn't mean the purchasing power going down, just transfering it to the governments. It's still quite scary though, as I wouldn't be surprised if it happened again :(

The scariest thing is if all the countries in the world try to ban gold and Bitcoin at the same time to preserve the fiat system.

I'm hopeful that as Schnorr signatures will make coinjoins more practical, it will be easier to use as well, thereby making ownership of Bitcoins less visible to governments. Wasabi wallet is great at doing coinjoins, but when I tried it, it was just too slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I actually wrote a post about coming up with ideas, and the difficulty of doing so before:

[https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to- consis...](https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-consistently- come-up-with-great-ideas.html)

There are two things you need for ideas:

1\. The raw material from which to generate them: Other older ideas.

2\. A mind that is able to synthesize ideas appropriately.

Ideas becoming 'harder' to 'find', is simply a function of one of these two things not being fully optimized.

I personally don't think that we have less of either of the two.

So no, I don't think Ideas are getting harder to find.

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe we should take an evolutionary perspective on this? Some ideas may be good in any environment and I expect they would be harder to find over time. Other ideas are probably good or bad depending on their environment.

If the environment is fairly stable then we would expect good ideas to get harder to find (evolution slows down), but when there is a big change, I expect it would be a lot easier to find new ideas that only made sense recently.

Which is to say, I think the answer to this question is probably "no" in the short term, and we should see more ways that creative thinking pays off.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if this is partially a function of decreased attention spans. It takes more discipline than ever to turn off distractions and focus on innovative solutions to hard problems.

EDIT: This quote seems relevant[1]:

> It is fair to say that, in general, no problems have been exhausted; > instead, men have been exhausted by the problems.

[1] [https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important- scient...](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important-scientific- problems-have-yet-to-be-solved/)

<comment><USER50> I seriously wonder this as well.

I managed to build a profitable small business and mostly automate it. But now that I'm back in the search for another more ambitious idea to work on, it is way too easy to be distracted by all the electronics around me than to be able to ponder deeply about ideas.

I tried reading a novel the other day, I couldn't make it through 3 pages without reading some random BS on the interwebs.

Damn capitalism for incentivizing companies to make everything as addictive as possible...

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Good ideas that are beneficial, yes. However, there are a lot of less optimal solutions for the human race out there, some are even in production, e.g. tracking people, social media

</comment><comment><USER52> Note that the article is talking about _research_ ideas for researchers to research. Not for business ideas for entrepreneurs to develop. I clicked expecting the latter. It doesn't surprise me that academic research fields dry up over time.

</comment><comment><USER53> Intelligent design theory is a giant unexplored pool of ideas. I am currently looking into bioinformatics applications and there are just so many! Ask me questions if interested!

</comment><comment><USER54> We stand on the shoulders of giants... ... and there are many barriers to access to those giants these days. (paywalls, patent overuse, market exclusion by .1%, ideological blind spots in communities, too many standards, too many standards behind paywalls or other blocking infrastructure)

The last is touched on by community in-fighting. People fighting over which standard product to look like.

PS: I work in wireless. Some of the barriers are there because people do really insecure new ideas that risk people's security. That's generally a good reason for standards and standard bodies.

</comment><comment><USER55> I was going to make a pithy comment here, but everything had been said.

</comment><comment><USER56> tl;dr We haven't had any deep conceptual revolutions nor massive new sources of cheap energy for a while

Estimating how much innovation to expect depends on how you set the baseline. There are a couple of reasons for considering the first half of the twentieth century to have been the most revolutionary period in history both theoretically and technologically (not unrelated areas) at the same time as harnessing vast reserves of hydrocarbons to give us millions of years of stored sunlight to burn as fast as we can build machines to consume it. Theoretical revolutions involved working out consequences of Electromagnetism, Einstein and Quantum mechanics, and of course computation powering the calculations. Electrification, real-time long-distance communication, cars, trucks and planes... We were riding out the consequences of the easiest applications of these novelties and now it's getting incrementally harder to squeeze out the benefits.

</comment><comment><USER57> no. i think it's ideas are harder to get funding for. everyone wants results and wants them now. this short term pressure creates noise, and noise is expensive.

</comment><comment><USER58> options for us as humans are growing, today you can travel by plane, travel to space, buy something around the world, learn whatever you want online...

hyperproductivity is here, but both market and options are increasing too so not sure what math could be used realistically but for sure we can't foresee in near future death of ideas

</comment><comment><USER59> For a deep dive look at this, I highly recommend [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the- sing...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity- was-cancelled/)

Funny that Scott wrote this exactly one year ago today.

</comment><comment><USER60> 0[poiw

</comment><comment><USER61> Maybe, it's getting hard to find ideas due to all these paywalls.

<comment><USER62> Yes, but sites like: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- chrome](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome) [https://sci- hub.tw/](https://sci-hub.tw/) exist and make it trivial to get around draconian publishing practices. I'm not advocating not paying for journalism ---it's just that not everyone realistically can, and paywalling them seems like a bad solution.

A more plausible reason, at least to me, is the increasing specialization of fields and lack of cross-field communication.

Also, ideas seem to be flowing plentifully at least in math and TCS, where old and hard conjectures are still being proved with astonishing regularity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

<comment><USER64> Mr. Betteridge retired many years ago.

Not literally!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393248)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> i have a feeling there may be some interesting ideas hiding in the paper somewhere, can someone who happens to read the paper share a TLDR?

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm pretty sure that Ancient Greeks thought that everything has already been discovered.

<comment><USER67> If the ancient Greeks thought that subsequent discoveries would get harder and harder, they might have been right.

<comment><USER68> The implementation get trickier. Better solutions to existing problems are usually more complicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Two words: Rex Research

In the aftermath of WWII the so-called "Men in Black" were formed, not to police aliens (what a conceit!) but to sequester _dangerous technology_ like free energy and anti-gravity.

With great responsibility comes great power.

There are all kinds of awesome technologies but each one is as dangerous as it is powerful, and we are fucking nuts, so it's kept a secret. Rex Research is one of the "holes" where the knowledge is allowed to leak out as a kind of pressure-release valve.

<comment><USER70> > _Rex Research_

Can you back this up with sources? This sounds like paranoid conspiracy theory.

Most inventions are "invented" in multiple places at nearly the same time. If free energy is possible, how was each and every discovery nation, by nation, squashed? How do you stop it from spreading once that cat is out of the bag?

<comment><USER69> Some secrets keep themselves.</comment></comment></comment>


The JPEG Committee Is "exploring Blockchain" to Put DRM into JPEG - <AUTHOR> https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/08/10/the-jpeg-committee-is-exploring-blockchain-to-put-drm-into-jpeg/ <comment><USER3> Why stop there? Why not emoji?

Why not deprecate sub-32-bit data types? Maybe we should push for chipsets that refuse to print " _Hello World_ " because, as with the Happy Birthday song, someone needs to get their cut.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is just sad.

<comment><USER5> I dunno, sounds kind of interesting. Imagine the pain that creators feel when their images get reposted without credit or permission. Sometimes this can even lead to financial losses for the creator.

A lot depends on how this is implemented, but it would be great to have more options than a watermark and low resolution as ways of protecting your work.

<comment><USER6> Right. So that's a DRM argument which is a whole extra world of pain. But using blockchain? Really? Especially since DRM's of various varieties are well understood, standardised and implemented - can't they just use one of those?

And... if it 'aint broke...

<comment><USER7> [author here] The mooted plan is to reuse the DRM from JPEG 2000 part 8 - <USER2> generalise it to just-plain-JPEG.

As I note in the piece:

> I have heard of _one_ case of someone trying to use JPEG 2000 DRM — a > pornographic site selling DRMed pictures around 2009. Customers had to run a > Java applet in their web browser. It didn't work well, and was a tech > support nightmare — I was told about it by one of said tech support people. > The porn site gave up on this terrible idea very quickly. The Java applet > company apparently went bust a few months later.

JPEG 2000 has a few niche users, who are very happy with it - but they hardly ever go past JPEG 2000 Part 1, the bit that's all about better-compressed images.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stargazing technology used to spot cancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Telecommunications_Integrated_Applications/Stargazing_technology_used_to_spot_cancer <comment><USER2> It almost makes you wonder if we should be spending significantly more on basic science research.

The dividends paid by basic research are difficult to measure.

<comment><USER3> Proton therapy (to treat tumors etc.) is a side benefit of particle accelerators.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy#History)

Blows my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bit of an odd article causing a few wtf moments

> engineers from UK company Adaptix have used technology developed for space > to produce three-dimensional scans that generate much clearer images.

3D xrays sound a lot like CT scanners.

> Miniaturised, portable and connected through satellites, the machine should > also allow patients to be scanned in GPs' surgeries...

Sounds very buzzwordy; there seems to be very few situations where a satellite uplink would be better than a bit of fibre, especially in fixed premises.

The rest of the article seems like flimflam marketing about general scientific discovery, nothing else about how this actually works or detects cancer so clearly other than "The device employs X-ray optics deployed on spacecraft such as ESA's XMM-Newton mission, which launched in 1999 and is observing stars at X-ray wavelengths."

Can anyone comment on what it's actually doing please?

<comment><USER5> The breakthrough seems like the clarity of the images, few cameras operate with as little light as a space based telescope used to view distant objects. They seems to have paired that tech with tradition CT scanner. So you are not technically wrong but I'm not sure why those are wtf points, any improvement is a good improvement when hunting for tumors. I have thought to myself many times while observing a doctor look at the various scans they take, "wtf, those images are shit, you sure there is no cancer doc?". Also competition in this space is excellent, hyping this is better than your next deliver service startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wanted to make a sarcastic comment on Brexit but it's perhaps too serious to leave it as a joke :( will this project be shuttered as part of Brexit and what are the other that risk a similar fate?

<comment><USER7> It looks like there are non-EU members of ESA (e.g. Turkey and Israel) so hopefully the UK can stay involved with ESA if Brexit happens:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency#EU_and_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency#EU_and_the_European_Space_Agency)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The small numbers they use to fund projects like these is laughable. If this is remotely true they should fund it with 1 billion.

</comment><comment><USER8> How long before they spot Gemini or Leo?</comment>


Show HN: SocialTV app redesigned – download TV shows free - <AUTHOR> http://socialtvapp.me/home/

<comment><USER2> Just tried to search for a couple programs with all of them ending up redirecting me to a JSON error response ({"error": 1}). Loading up a show page appears to be quite slow as well.

Haven't tried actually downloading any shows yet, though.</comment>


The $5,000 decision to get rid of my past - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/12/15958318/the-5000-decision-to-get-rid-of-my-past <comment><USER2> Folks, don't let the relatively mundane-sounding title make you overlook this wonderfully-written account.</comment>


Tom Wheeler slams Ajit Pai's plan to kill net neutrality rules - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/tom-wheeler-slams-ajit-pais-plan-to-kill-net-neutrality-rules/?amp=1 <comment><AUTHOR> _Wheeler 's FCC didn't prohibit ISPs from demanding payments for network interconnection, but it set up a complaint process._

 _" That simple keeping-an-eye-on-what's-going-on has resulted in the elimination of the interconnection bottlenecks that existed before, and interconnection prices actually going down, just because somebody was watching," Wheeler said._

And in the same realm of merely being able to keep an eye on things, rather than being heavy handed, the repeal proposal includes eliminating some requirements for full price and cap disclosure at sign-up time. Upon repeal they won't have to tell you about additional fees to rent a modem, cancellation fees, duration of promotional pricing, data caps or the pricing for going over those caps.

By permitting ISPs from withholding information, consumers can't make effective market decisions. I don't see how anyone argues against regulations that require these companies to simply disclose facts, unless they like the idea of ISPs hiding these costs from consumers.</comment>


Kuma Donated to CNCF - <AUTHOR> https://konghq.com/blog/kuma-0-6-0-released-with-hybrid-universal-support-for-service-mesh/ <comment><USER2> Will there be a supported version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, looks like through Kong

<comment><USER2> If CNCF owns the project now, does that mean they decide the roadmap? Or is that still Kong?

<comment><USER3> The contributors and maintainers of the project will decide the roadmap, like for any other CNCF project.

Kuma is an open governance project, so you can get involved, contribute and even become a maintainer: [https://github.com/Kong/kuma/blob/master/GOVERNANCE.md](https://github.com/Kong/kuma/blob/master/GOVERNANCE.md)

The best way to get involved is by joining the bi-weekly calls as well as the community channels like Slack and GitHub: [https://kuma.io/community/](https://kuma.io/community/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


All Linux Distributions Store Wi-Fi Passwords in Plain Text - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/All-Linux-Distributions-Store-Wi-Fi-Passwords-in-Plain-Text-If-You-Don-t-Use-Encryption-412387.shtml <comment><USER2> hilarious

The passwords are only accessible by root, the "exploit" here consists in obtaining physical access to the machine and booting from a boot disk to get the information from the hard disk.

In this case it's not just your wifi passwords that are lost. Its everything.

Let's say the passwords are encrypted with the users password so they can only be recovered by someone who can login to the machine. Well then the attacker can just replace the software on the system to log the passwords and send them to him next time the machine goes online.

The only bug here is not wasting time with security theatre.

</comment><comment><USER3> * rolls eyes*

In Windows, Start -> Run -> ncpa.cpl, right-click Wi-Fi adapter -> Status -> Wireless Properties -> Security tab -> "Show characters".

</comment><comment><USER4> Using Kubuntu and wifi passwords appear to be stored in the kdewallet, not /etc/NetworkManager.</comment>


The shipping network that keeps the world running - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150209-the-network-that-runs-the-world <comment><USER2> I recently read The Box[1] by Marc Levinson. It is an excellent read which explains how the container came to be - it's really fascinating to think that this ubiquitous thing was only invented about 50 years ago.

The book is very entertaining and informative, though it has a rather US- centric approach (being Danish, I obviously looked for when Maersk would be introduced, but they are barely mentioned). I especially enjoyed the explanations of how shipping worked before "the box." Dockworkers' unions were extremely powerful, to the extent of introducing ridiculous rules. E.g. "seven people must be assigned to each hatch on the ship, even if there is not enough for them to move there, and they are not allowed to help crews at other hatches." They went to extreme lengths to protect their jobs, and ultimately failed because they would not accept that they could not stop the container.

[1] [http://smile.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller- Econo...](http://smile.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller- Economy/dp/0691136408/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1423655225&sr=8-1&keywords=the+box+marc+levinson)

<comment><USER3> I just finished _Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate_ by Rose George. It focuses more on the life at sea, working conditions, regulation, changes in the industry, pirates, ransoms, and other things. Broad scope, readable, interesting, unique, recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The company I work for, www.stage3systems.com, builds logistical web apps for marine shipping and related industries - our software covers the full spectrum of the industry from vessel construction to port agency.

I've been at Stage 3 for about two years and it has been incredibly fascinating learning about the business from the inside. As efficient as they may appear, the day-to-day operations of the businesses within shipping are generally riddled with piles of paper documents and mountains of email. And we're trying to pivot their centuries-old workflows which is an incredibly eye-opening and difficult problem.

<comment><USER5> More power to you! I worked in fuel shipping and bunkering, and the fact that many times a day I had to haul a typewriter up 60ft of rope ladder to produce receipts to be signed by the captain/chief eng. because the only tech they trusted was CARBON PAPER in the year 2008 simply boggled!

<comment><USER4> I know, it just completely boggles the mind. One of the products I lead is based around agency operations - these guys are probably some of the heaviest paper pushers in the industry. And I'll walk into an office and see them creating them with typewriters, by hand, or slowly tapping away at their keyboard into Word, burning through a five-figure annual printer budget. A port call will involve a few dozen documents (B/Ls, customs forms, etc). One of the product modules effectively automates that and it's an incredible impact on their workload.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you find container shipping interesting, and perhaps Maersk specifically, Markus Völter did an episode [1] on the topic on his Omega Tau podcast a while back. The episode also goes into some depth about how optimisation is applied to some of the processes in the industry. Full disclosure: I am one of the interviewees.

[1] [http://omegataupodcast.net/2014/04/146-container- shipping/](http://omegataupodcast.net/2014/04/146-container-shipping/)

</comment><comment><USER7> For that extra sense of perspective, trying opening one of the many cargo tracking apps and make them display all the ships in the world.

[http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml](http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml) [http://www.marinetraffic.com/](http://www.marinetraffic.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Log into a Bloomberg terminal and use the BMAP function. Lots of fun: (near) real-time tracking of cargo vessels plus their cargo, and a lot of other interesting data re commodities, weather, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> At EMF Camp last summer, Dan W gave a great talk about his similar Unknown Fields trip on a container ship. This by far was one of the highlights of the event, as it was extremely insightful into this hidden world. You can watch the talk at [http://www.iamdanw.com/said/emfcamp/](http://www.iamdanw.com/said/emfcamp/)

Dan is now writing up the journey, you can follow his tales at [http://www.iamdanw.com/postcards/](http://www.iamdanw.com/postcards/)

</comment><comment><USER10> > _It 's a hypnotic, fascinating dance to watch: the cranes lifting containers > off the ships, the trucks pulling up in time to catch them as they are > elegantly lowered down on steel cables._

What is a good video of this?

<comment><USER11> Not entirely what you asked for, but:

1) It has plenty of shots of ships 2) is really cool to watch anyway

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjD9VvhXJrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjD9VvhXJrE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have such a sense of awe when looking at pictures of container ships. This article sums it up pretty well. Capitalism certainly has its downsides, but results in some pretty amazing things. Then again, the same could be said about totalitarianism. I guess you could generalize it to: modern powerful entities can do amazing things.

<comment><USER13> You can't get anything big done without power, and often times that power requires the needs of the group to be greater than the needs of the individual ..</comment></comment>


ANU Scientists create a Tractor Beam on water [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.anu.edu/vision/videos/12091/

<comment><USER2> How will this work in an unfixed domain? A domain with no walls, as some of their visualisations seem to use the walls to generate the field.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought rip currents (known popularly as rip "tides") were pretty well understood, and it has nothing to do with this "tractor beam" effect: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_current](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_current)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great, now do the same trick with sound pressure waves in air!

<comment><USER5> That's been done too! (different lab) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odJxJRAxdFU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odJxJRAxdFU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The key thing about this is that objects can be pulled towards the device, rather than pushed away.

</comment><comment><USER7> So, uhm, where is the beam?

</comment><comment><USER8> Url changed from [http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/11/tractor-beam-for- water/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/11/tractor-beam-for-water/), which points to this.

<comment><USER9> The new URL doesn't work though. Looking to find the typo.

Ah here it is: [http://www.anu.edu/vision/videos/12091/](http://www.anu.edu/vision/videos/12091/)

(no edu.au at the end)

<comment><USER8> Weird; that one worked for me. However, the other one works too, so I changed it. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


The Happiness Formula: H=S+C+V - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sokanu.com/the-happiness-equation-hscv

<comment><USER2> So basically whether you feel good is a function of who you are and what you do, and we can summarize that in a few meaningless letters? Amazing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I think if we look at it from an analytical point of view, it becomes pretty obvious. I think if we step back and look at it from a psychological perspective, it becomes a little more interesting. The idea that we are set within a "happiness range" and then have certain variables that affect that range is pretty interesting.

Still, thanks for the opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So what units are these components measured in? How do we know this is dimensionally consistent?

</comment><comment><USER4> Nah...I play Protoss :P

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, that's good.</comment></comment>


Power of customizability and Time management = Smarter task management - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/orgzit/think-your-task-management-solutions-are-a-setback-read-this-f2b4a37ded3e <comment><USER2> Yes! The ability to add custom fields is missing from so many apps. Also necessary for task management / bug repos is: * The ability to view and edit the data like a spreadsheet. * The ability to customize your view with an SQL query.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! Would love to see if you think Orgzit can be a solution to this.

Give it a try? www.orgzit.com</comment></comment>